The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Monday, December 24, 2012

[The Asia Times Online yearender, which appeared on Dec. 22, 2012. It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.]

The passing year was the
People's Republic of China's (PRC) first
opportunity to get up close and personal with the
United States' pivot back to Asia, the strategic
rebalancing that looks a lot like containment.

The PRC spent a lot of 2012 wrestling with
contentious neighbors emboldened by the US policy,
like Vietnam and the Philippines; combating
American efforts to nibble away at the corners of
China's spheres of influence on the Korean
peninsula and Southeast Asia; and engaging in a
test of strength and will with the primary US
proxy in the region, Japan.

This state
affairs was misleadingly if predictably spun in
the Western press as "assertive China exacerbates regionaltensions", while a more
accurate reading was probably "China's rivals
exacerbate regional tensions in order to stoke
fears of assertive China."

Whatever the
framing, this was the year that the world - and in
particular Japan - discovered that the PRC can and
could kick back against the pivot.

The fat
years for "rising China" were the presidencies of
George W Bush. Preoccupied with cascading
disasters in the Middle East, a burgeoning fiscal
deficit that demanded a foreign partner with an
insatiable appetite for US debt, and, later on, a
meltdown in the US and world economies, Bush had
no stomach for mixing it up with China.

The PRC took the ball and ran with it,
emerging as an overpowering presence in East Asia,
plowing into Africa, establishing itself as a
crucial paymaster for the European Union, and
hammering away at the final bastions of Western
leadership of the post-World War II planet: the
major multinational policy and financial
institutions.

Rollback was inevitable, and
it was pursued, purposefully, carefully, and
incrementally under Barack Obama.

Also
back is ineffable American self-regard. With the
election and re-election of a black president from
a modest background, the United States reclaimed
as its assumed birthright the moral high ground,
something that one might think the US had
forfeited for a decade or two thanks to the Iraq
War, American mismanagement of the global
financial system, and the failure to face the
existential issue of climate change.

It
would have been amusing, in a grim sort of way, to
see if the election of Mitt Romney as president
would have elicited the same ecstatic neo-liberal
squealing about the glories of American democracy
that we saw with President Obama's re-election. In
any case, the comically inept Romney was no match
for the popularity, intelligence, and relentless
organizational focus of Obama and American
self-righteousness - or, as Evan Olnos of the New
Yorker would approvingly characterize it,
America's "moral charisma" - is back.

With
the United States firmly back in the leadership
saddle, at least as far as the foreign affairs
commentariat is concerned, China has nothing to
show the world except the flaws of an
authoritarian political and economic system,
nothing to teach except as an object lesson in how
to avoid them, and no right to participate in any
world leadership councils except by Western
sufferance.

This attitude dovetails almost
perfectly with Obama's apparent disdain for the
PRC as an opaque, unfriendly, and unsavory regime
that responds to engagement with overreach, one
that must be stressed, pressured, and coerced in
order to drive it toward humanity's preferred
goals. Under the leadership of the Obama
administration, the West has made the significant
decision to restrain China instead of accommodate
it.

China will be a welcome partner in the
world order, at least defined by the West, only if
it democratizes, dismantles its state-controlled
economy, and adheres to the standards of liberal
multinational institutions in seeking its place in
the world order. These outcomes are so far off the
radar as far as the current PRC leadership is
concerned, the only near-term endgame on these
terms is regime collapse.

That's a risky
bet. If the regime doesn't collapse, a simmering,
constitutional hostility between the PRC and its
many antagonists is on the books for the
foreseeable future.

China's response has
been to avoid confronting the United States
head-on, instead probing for weaknesses in the US
chain of proxies and allies, while trying to shore
up weaknesses in its own proxies and allies.

The only unalloyed win for the PRC in East
Asia in 2012 was the re-election of the
Kuomintang's Ma Ying-jeou as president of Taiwan.
President Ma has a steady-as-she-goes policy of
minimal friction with the PRC, in contrast to the
fractious pro-independence and pro-Japanese
Democratic Progressive Party. In 2012 he went a
step further. In a move that was largely ignored
in the Western press because it complicated the
narrative of unilateral PRC thuggery, Ma
dispatched a flotilla of official and unofficial
vessels to give grief to the Japanese coastguard
presence around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.

Other than Taiwan, one of the brighter
spots in the authoritarian firmament has been the
gradual pro-China/pro-reform tilt of North Korea
under Kim Jong-eun. The PRC is still making the
Obama administration pay for its disastrous
miscalculation in 2009, when the US thought that
the PRC's overwhelming trade ties with South Korea
would cause Beijing to abandon North Korea in the
aftermath of the Cheonan outrage (the
sinking of a South Korean frigate by forces
unknown, but widely assumed to be North Korea) and
join the United States in a multi-lateral
diplomatic and sanctions-fueled beatdown of the
Pyongyang regime.

Instead, the late Kim
Jung-il realized that his long-standing
opera-bouffe efforts at engagement with the United
States were futile and got on his armored train to
journey into China and fall into the welcoming
arms of Hu Jintao.

On the other side of
the ledger, Myanmar threatened to slide out of the
PRC camp with the decision of the government to
rebalance its foreign policy away from China
toward the United States and reach an
accommodation with domestic pro-democracy forces.
The necessary demonstrations of pro-democracy and
pro-Western enthusiasm by the Thein Sein
government were 1) the release of Aung San Suu Kyi
from house arrest and her return to public life
and 2) postponement of the Myitsone hydroelectric
project.

The Myitsone project was
unpopular domestically because it was PRC-funded
and had been adopted as a symbol of the casual
sell-out of Myanmar interests to China by corrupt
generals. Postponing Myitsone was popular with the
West because it raised the possibility it would
block development of Myanmar's sizable
hydroelectric potential by China and, instead,
allow Western interests, shut out of the Myanmar
economy for years because of sanctions, to
reorient hydropower exports away from China and
towards Thailand.

The PRC has responded
cautiously to the Myanmar shift, apparently taking
consolation in its dominant role in Myanmar's
economy, foreign trade, and security policy thanks
to the long and porous border the two countries
share.

Myanmar's political elites,
including Aung San Suu Kyi, apparently have
decided that an anti-China economic jihad would be
counter-productive and the PRC has good reason to
hope that by upping its public relations game,
spreading money around to deserving citizens both
inside and outside politics (and perhaps
discretely renegotiating some terms of some
excessively favorable sweetheart deals with the
Myanmar junta), it can successfully navigate the
now dangerous shoals of Myanmar multi-party
politics (in which a traditional strain of
anti-Chinese populism has become an inevitable
tool of political and popular mobilization).

In a sign that the United States also
hoped to put Laos and Cambodia into play,
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid a rare
visit to the Laotian capital of Vientiane before
putting in an appearance at Phnom Penh for a
get-together of the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN). Results were mixed, as Cambodia
loyally defended the PRC from an attempt to place
an ASEAN united front versus China concerning a
South China Sea mediation initiative on the
agenda.

Cambodian and Laotian desires to
distance themselves from the big bully of Asia,
the PRC, are perhaps counterbalanced by their
desire to keep the big bully of Southeast Asia,
Vietnam, at bay. As for Vietnam, it has learned
that, as far as the United States is concerned,
China is not Iran and Vietnam is not Israel - at
least for now, and quite possibly for always.

Even
as the United States has vocally supported freedom
of navigation in the South China Sea and a
multilateral united front in dealing with the PRC,
it has avoided "taking sides in territorial
disputes" - the only kind of dispute that the
nations surrounding the South China Sea care
about, since "the PRC threat to freedom of
navigation" in the area is little more than a
nonsensical canard.

With the US Seventh Fleet
unlikely to slide into the South China Sea and
blast away at Chinese vessels as an adjunct to the
Vietnamese navy, Vietnam appears to have drawn the
lesson from the PRC's ferocious mugging of Japan
that the disadvantages of auditioning for the role
of frontline state in the anti-China alliance may
outweigh the benefits.

The big story in
East Asian security affairs this year was the
PRC's decision to bully Japan, ostensibly over the
idiotic fetish of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, but
actually because of Tokyo's decision to give moral
and material support to the US pivot by once again
making an issue of the wretched (Taiwanese)
islands.

In 2010, China made the
diplomatically disastrous decision to retaliate officially against
a Japanese provocation - Seiji Maehara's
insistence on trying a Chinese fishing trawler
captain in Japanese courts for a maritime
infraction near the Senkakus. A relatively limited
and measured effort to send a message to Japan by
a go-slow enforcement effort in the murky
demimonde of rare earth exports became a China
bashing cause celebre, an opportunity for
Japan to raise the US profile in East Asian
maritime security matters, and an invitation to
China's other neighbors to fiddle with offshore
islands and attempt to elicit a counterproductive
overreaction from Beijing.

In 2012, the
PRC was ready, probably even spoiling for a fight,
seizing the opportunity even when the Yoshihiko
Noda government clumsily tried to defuse/exploit
the Senkaku issue by cutting in line in front of
Tokyo governor and ultranationalist snake-oil
peddler Shintaro Ishihara to purchase three of the
islands.

This time, Chinese retaliation
was clothed in the diplomatically and legally
impervious cloak of populist attacks on Japanese
economic interests inside China. The 2012 campaign
did far more damage to Japan than the 2010
campaign, which was conceived as a symbolic shot
across the bow of Japan Inc. The Japanese economy
was not doing particularly well even before the
2012 Senkaku protests devastated Japanese auto
sales and overall Japanese investment in China,
raising the possibility that China might deliver a
mortal blow, and not just a pointed message, to
Japan.

The major US effort to refocus the
economic priorities of Asia and offer material
benefits to countries like Japan which line up
against the PRC - the China-excluding Trans
Pacific Partnership - is facing difficulties in
its advance as economies hedge against the
distinct possibility that China and not the United
States (which is looking more like an exporting
competitor than demand engine for Asian tigers)
will be the 21st century driver of Asian growth.

It looks likely the US pivot into Asia
will be a costly, grinding war of attrition fought
on multiple fronts - with Japan suffering a
majority of the damage - instead of a quick
triumph for either side.

This year, let's
call it a draw.

Call it a draw in most of
the rest of the world as well.

The Indian government apparently feels that
the Himalayas provide an adequate no-man's-land
between the PRC and India and warily navigated a
path between China and the United States.

With the re-election to president of Vladimir
Putin and a return to a more in-your-face
assertion of Russian prerogatives vis-a-vis the
United States, Russia is less likely to curry
favor with the US at Chinese expense than it was
under Dmitry Medvedev.

On the other hand, the European Union, winner
of the Nobel Prize for Pathetic Lurching
Dysfunction, excuse me, the Nobel Peace Price, is
desperately cleaving to the United States in most
geopolitical matters, including a stated aversion
to Chinese trade policies, security posture, and
human rights abuses. It remains to be seen whether
this resolve is rewarded by a recovery in the
Western economies, or falls victim to Europe's
need for a Chinese bailout. The most
interesting and revealing arena for US-China
competition and cooperation is one of the most
unlikely: the Middle East. The PRC has apparently
been attempting a pivot of its own, attempting to
leverage its dominant position as purchaser of
Middle Eastern energy from both Saudi Arabia and
Iran into a leadership role.

With the
United States approaching national, or at least
continental self-sufficiency through domestic
fracking and consumption of Canadian tar sands -
and ostentatiously pivoting into Asia - it might
seem prudent and accommodating to welcome Chinese
pretensions to leadership in the Middle East.

The PRC has a not-unreasonable portfolio
of Middle East positions: lip service at least to
Palestinian aspirations, acceptance of Israel's
right to exist and thrive, a regional security
regime based on economic development instead of
total war between Sunni and Shi'ite blocs,
grudging accommodation of Arab Spring regimes (as
long as they want to do business), an
emir-friendly preference for stability over
democracy, and an end to the Iran nuclear idiocy.

As to the issue of the Syrian
bloodletting, the PRC has consistently promoted a
political solution involving a degree of
power-sharing between Assad and his opponents. The
United States, perhaps nostalgic for the 30 years
of murder it has abetted in the Middle East and
perversely unwilling to let go of the bloody mess,
has refused to cast China for any role other than
impotent bystander.

Syria, in particular,
symbolizes America's middle-finger approach to
Middle East security. Washington is perfectly
happy to see the country torn to pieces, as long
as it denies Iran, Russia, and China an ally in
the region.

The message to China seems to
be: the United States can "pivot" into Asia and
threaten a security regime that has delivered
unprecedented peace and prosperity, but the PRC
has no role in the Middle East even though - make
that because - that region is crucial to China's
energy and economic security.

This is a
dynamic that invites China to muscle up
militarily, project power, and strengthen its
ability to control its security destiny throughout
the hemisphere.

The likely response is not
going to be for threatened regional actors to lean
on Uncle Sam, which has more of a sporting than
existential interest in keeping a lid on things in
Asia. Even today, the Obama administration has yet
to come up with an effective riposte to China's
playing cat and mouse with Japan - and chicken
with the global economy. Sailing the Seventh Fleet
around the western Pacific in search of tsunami
and typhoon victims and dastardly pirates is not
going to help Japan very much.

If Japan
decides to seize control of its security destiny
by turning its back on its pacifist constitution,
staking out a position as an independent military
power, and turning its full spectrum nuclear
weapons capability into a declared nuclear arsenal
- and South Korea nukes up in response - the
famous pivot could turn into a death spiral for US
credibility and influence in the region.

If this happens, 2012 will be remembered
as the year it all began to unravel.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Most of it, anyway.In a bizarre incident, the theater fire alarm went off just as the Seal
Team Six helicopter was about to touch down in Abbottabad.The Arclight made the interesting decision to
keep the movie running (or non-decision, to be more accurate:in the brave new world of automated
multi-screen projection, there is no grizzled projectionist in the theater booth
minding the store, nor, it appears, is there a technerd with an eye on the
monitors or a finger on the button in the central control room either).A lot of people remained in their seats at
first, thinking that a descending stealth helicopter makes the same beeping and
flashing commotion as a Honda SUV backing out of a driveway.No announcement was made, so the flummoxed
audience ignored the emergency exits and eventually jostled its way out into
the jam-packed lobby.There, the
black-shirted hipsters who serve as the Arclight staff were wandering through
the crowd, seemingly as non-plussed as anyone else.If there is a PA system for the complex,
nobody flipped it on to inform and instruct the bewildered herd.Information, or its equivalent, percolated
through the scrum as a series of mumbled exchanges.I was able to buttonhole one staffer and take
care of the Angeleno’s existential concern—parking validation—and head off into
the night with the promise that I could eventually obtain, not a refund, but a voucher
for further viewing.Fortunately, the
whole thing was either a false alarm or an extremely minor ruckus.If it had been a serious sh*tstorm, there
would have been a lot of terminally disappointed people, if you get what I’m
sayin’.

So I didn’t get to see the final confrontation.However, by that time the tone of the movie
regarding everybody’s pressing interest—torture!—had already been set.Of course, if it turns out in the final reel that
the Seal team mistakenly barged in on Dick Cheney shuffling around in his
slippers and bathrobe at his secret location, and then the cast popped out of
the closets for an end-credit rendition of “Always Look on the Sunny Side of
Life” I am mistaken about the direction that the movie was taking.But I don’t think so.

Torture works, at least for Kathryn Bigelow.I think she’s fascinated with it, and it’s
really near the heart of Zero Dark Thirty.At the same time I think that she, and her screenwriter, Mark Boal, made
the cautious decision not to kill the Oscar-buzz with a queasy piece of torture
porn, and instead frame the hunt for bin Laden as a neutral-toned albeit
torture-sodden counter-intelligence procedural, a “just the facts, Ma’am”
approach for those of you old enough to remember Jack Webb and Dragnet.

The film is grim, and grimly convincing, as a picture of the
United States and the CIA spending billions of dollars to bulldoze through a
world they despise to kill a man they hate.

The objective tone works against depicting Maya (Jessica
Chastain) as a sympathetic character, despite the presence of standard action
movie vengeance-shall-be-mine personal motivators-- they killed my (kinda)
friend!They tried to kill me!Twice!Instead, her zeal comes across as shrill and impersonal.

Which is probably the way things really are in the CIA.The people who get things done within that
massive and murderous bureaucracy are probably more determined, more callous,
and more unpleasant than their determined, callous, and unpleasant peers.

When the film shows Chastain wrung out after a tough day of
torturing a recalcitrant detainee, one is left to wonder if Bigelow is
descending to the dishonest humanizing cliché, or whether Chastain is simply expressing
the zero-affect aggravation of a mechanic unable to repair a balky
transmission.

In keeping with this approach, the movie cannily throws out
enough pro- and anti-torture tropes for people on both sides of the argument to
seize upon.

On the one hand, enhanced interrogation techniques are
unambiguously portrayed as torture, not fraternity pranks, and the potential
for extracting misleading information is referenced in a scene in which a
tormented detainee is stuffed in a tiny box while randomly muttering days of
the week for an impending attack.

On the other hand…

The end of the torture regime is not occasioned by any
handwringing over its legality, morality, or operational efficacy.Instead, the CIA station personnel are shown
staring, with at the very best, mute resignation, at a broadcast of candidate
Obama promising to discontinue torture.Near the end of the movie there is a lot of “is UBL really in there” suspense-mongering,
with probabilities of 60% and up being thrown around.One leading national security honcho bemoans
the fact that with the discontinuation of the “detainee program”, confirmation
cannot be wrung out of the inmates at Guantanamo.

I don’t think Bigelow is interested in passing judgment on the
efficacy of torture as a counter-intelligence policy.But torture does exist, at or beyond the
legal extremes of government spook-work, depending on who’s writing the memos,
and Bigelow is drawn to exploring its implications and how a hero working
heroically in counterintelligence would cope with it.The problem, for me, anyway, is that Bigelow
is interested in torture less as a moral dilemma than as a test of personal
strength and determination—for the torturer.She apparently regards torturers as potentially cool, because they are
out there, on the edge, dealing with the challenge, testing the limits of law,
social norms, morality, and endurance, and thereby testing themselves.

For me, Kathryn Bigelow tips her hand with her portrayal of
the lead interrogator, or torturer, if you will,“Dan”, played by Jason Clarke.He is studly, grizzled, cool, sympathetic, graceful
under pressure—and transgressive, in a Nietzschean will-to-power way, as Kathryn
Bigelow heroes often turn out to be.

I don’t know any torturers, at least I don’t think I do, but
color me unpersuaded concerning their heroic stature based on what I read about
the careful, calculated, and legalistic cruelty practiced in the enhanced interrogation
program at Guantanamo and the sadism inflicted on helpless, hapless (and
sometimes innocent) detainees at places like Bagram .

The element of the torture scenes (yes, there are several, torture
is not just a tone-setting appetizer at the beginning of the film) that I found
least convincing was the Hemingwayesque portrayal of the core confrontation
between Clarkeand detainee “Amar” (Reda
Kateb).

There is a lot of macho-man “bro”ing (as in “If you lie to
me, I’m going to hurt you, bro”) and a brief, absurd scene in which Clarke engages
in some manly wrassling to subdue Katebfor a session of waterboarding.

Subsequently, Clarke and Chastain are shown dining al fresco on Arab fare on a sun dappled patio
with a cleaned-up and relaxed Kateb , who calmly starts handing over important
intelligence goodies.

One doesn’t get the impression that Bigelow regards the
torture as the degradation of a helpless person by a figure of power (a more
accurate depiction of torture would probably involve the systematic and
unchivalric ego destruction at the core of the Bush era Enhanced Interrogation
Techniques).

Instead, it’s a studly conjugal transaction whose noble
outcome (the terrorist fought hard but the interrogator broke him; prizes for
everyone!) has somehow elevated and affirmed both parties.The feeling of homoerotic subtext is
reinforced when Clarkehands over a
post-coital cigarette to Kateb , who puffs on it with a dignified but grateful
reserve.

In a subsequent meeting at CIA headquarters, Clarke
instinctively and immediately mans up to take the rap for the torture program
if and when the legal hammer comes down.(Real-life spoiler: it doesn’t.)

But if you asked me where Bin Laden was, then I'm not the only person who has a problem.

Because I don't know where Bin Laden is, but if you think I do, and keep torturing me, you're going to get a lot of disinformation.

“Ticking time bombs”
do exist, I suppose, and perhaps once in a blue moon timely torture saves the
day.

But “ticking time bombs” are disproportionately invoked by
torture apologists to justify quotidian torture a.k.a. “enhanced interrogation
techniques” a.k.a. “coercive interrogation” a.k.a. “the third degree” as an
instrument of law enforcement/national security practice.And it’s pretty clear that routine torture
doesn’t yield good data, certainly not the "actionable intelligence unavailable by other means" that is torture's holy grail.

That’s because the martyrs and no-goodniks who expect to be
tortured develop countermeasures.

And because torturers usually go too far, out of stupidity,
sadism, or failing to make a careful plan to retrieve a discrete piece of
information.The weak signal—truthful information—is
often overwhelmed, almost instantaneously, by the noise generated by the
torturers’ poorly formulated questions and the victims’ disoriented responses.The response to this disappointing state of
affairs is often more torture, more bad data, more torture ad infinitum.

Somewhere, I know, there is a generously funded program
applying Claude Shannon’s information theory to optimize torture processes.

Of course, another reason to invoke the efficacy of torture
is to jazz up TV and movie depictions of counter-terrorism operations.“24” and “Zero Dark Thirty” might get pretty draggy if they showed that successful interrogation usually involves endless
cups of coffee and hours of tedious chitchat about some dirtbag’s boring
family until the guy’s past loyalties are so far in the rearview mirror that he
feels comfortable switching his allegiance to his captors.

When one views the fictionalized torture scene in Zero Dark Thirty, it should be recalled that the "torture gave us the intel" argument has been largely debunked.

Also remember that KSM was waterboarded 183 timesduring the real life hunt for Bin Laden...

...while he was interrogated as to the location of Bin Laden...

...and he gave wildly conflicting replies...

...just like I would.

KSM testified:

…be under
questioning so many statement which been some of them I make up stories
just location UBL. Where is he? I don’t know. Then he torture me.
Then I said yes, he is in this area …

An alternate depiction of the Bin Laden hunt--call it 183-Zero--might show the lovely and fragile Jessica Chastain determinedly and repeatedly waterboarding KSM, then spending a few dusty months in Kandahar chasing down false leads. Finally, she gets her hands on the guy she knows is the link to Bin Laden, she knows if she doesn't get this guy to spill his guts pronto OBL will slip through her fingers, so she gives him the third degree with mustard on it at Bagram and he tells her...

...he tells her she's got to talk to KSM at Guantanamo.

I see Terry Gilliam directing.

I’ve written on torture a few times, including an entire
print issue of Counterpunch on the issue of the Wickersham Commission, the
Hoover-era investigation that concluded that the third degree was
counterproductive, thereby laying the evidentiary foundation for the Miranda
ruling.

Here are a couple of pieces on torture that “worked” but
somehow “didn’t work” in KMT China and Bush-era Guantanamo.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Keeping Up With the Wickershams

I have an article in the current print edition of Counterpunch on the Wickersham Commission report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, under the pen name of Peter Lee.

This article will provide enlightenment to anyone who ever wondered why the abusive apes in Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who were named the “Wickersham Brothers”.

More
significantly, this report, prepared eight decades ago for Herbert
Hoover by Harvard law professor Zechariah Chafee, the most distinguished
guardian of civil rights in the first half of the twentieth century,
anticipates and repudiates virtually all of the arguments in favor
of—and abuses committed under the color of—“enhanced interrogation
techniques” or, as they were known back in the Roaring Twenties, “the
third degree”.

Chafee identified four reasons why beating people
up to get information was a bad idea: false confessions, the corruption
of police procedure as “fists trump wits”; the tainting of
prosecutions; and the collapse of police reputation in the public eye.

Monday, December 10, 2012

The article below this comment originally appeared at Asia Times Online on
December 8, 2012.It can be reposted if ATOl is credited
and a link provided.

Reuters for some reason continued to beat the Hainan coast
guard regulations dead horse with an analysis posted on December 9 that begins:

Imagine if the U.S. state of Hawaii
passed a law allowing harbor police to board and seize foreign boats operating
up to 1,000 km (600 miles) from Honolulu.

That,
in effect, is what happened in China about a week ago.

It’s not what happened in China a week ago, either actually or "in effect", as I
think can be concluded by reading my ATOl piece.Even if ATOl is not on Reuters’ radar, Dr.
Fravel of MIT (and his commentary at The Diplomat, which is quoted and
footnoted below) should be.It’s not
even what the article says, for that matter.

Actually, the Reuters piece looks like a factless rehash in
the genre of Western journalists unable
to extract useful information from stonewalling Chinese bureaucrats retaliate
with inflammatory lede.

And it is a dismal fail as a piece of snark.The jurisdiction of the state of Hawaii
extends 1380 miles from Honolulu to the outermost Northwestern Hawaiian Island,
the Kure Atoll.

For the mathematically challenged Reuters scribe, that’s
more than twice as far as 600 miles that supposedly symbolizes the irresponsible overreach of the Hainan provincial government.

Let's make it easier. Divide 1380 by 0.6 and you get 2300 km. Compare to 1000 km. Exactly 2.3 times further.

Uggh.

The only noteworthy element of this dismal entry in the
usually sterling Reuters canon is that it took seven people to write it:

John Ruwitch, with “[a]dditional reporting by Ben Blanchard
and Michael Martina in Beijing, Manny Mogato in Manila and Ho Binh Minh in
Hanoi; Editing by Bill Powell and Nick Macfie.”

Too many cooks, I guess.

CH, Dec. 10, 2012

China
makes a splash with coastguard
rules
By Peter Lee

New
regulations for the Hainan Province Coast Guard -
summarized in People's Republic of China (PRC)
news agency reports on November 28 but as yet not
published in full - generated a spasm of anxiety
through the region and around the world.

Part of the anxiety was due to alarmist
reporting by some otherwise prestigious outlets -
more on that later - but the PRC government
deserves the lion’s share of the blame for its
sudden, incomplete, and ambiguous announcement.

If the PRC is going to succeed in its
objective of ordering affairs in the South China
Seas to its liking through bilateral negotiations
with a number of rightfully resentful and
suspicious states - chiefly Vietnam and the
Philippines - it will have to communicate its tactical moves as
escalations and concessions carefully calibrated
to the demands of each local hot spot.

To
play the rogue dragon blundering through the
southern oceans simply reinforces the conviction
of China’s neighbors that better behavior and,
perhaps, better results can be obtained by the
solution that the PRC abhors: the aggrieved
nations clubbing together through the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and with the
support of the United States pursuing negotiations
in a multilateral forum.

Announcing the
new Hainan regulations through fragmentary reports
invited China’s South China Sea
adversaries/interlocutors to spin the news to suit
their priorities and preoccupations.

Judging from the agency reports, the meat
of the Hainan regulations was this:

Police in Hainan will be authorized
to board and search ships that illegally enter
the province's waters in 2013, the latest
Chinese effort to protect the South China Sea.

Under a set of regulation revisions the
Hainan People's Congress approved on Tuesday,
provincial border police are authorized to board
or seize foreign ships that illegally enter the
province's waters and order them to change
course or stop sailing.

The full texts
of the regulations, which take effect on Jan 1,
will soon be released to the public, said Huang
Shunxiang, director of the congress's press
office.

Activities such as entering the
island province's waters without permission,
damaging coastal defense facilities, and
engaging in publicity that threatens national
security are illegal.

If foreign ships
or crew members violate regulations, Hainan
police have the right to take over the ships or
their communications systems, under the revised
regulations. [1]

The next day, a
Reuters report from Jakarta interviewed Surin
Pitsawan, secretary-general of ASEAN, and came up
with: ASEAN chief voices alarm at China plan to
board ships in disputed waters. [2]

The
Reuters article occasioned a concerned post by
James Fallows at the Atlantic magazine's website:
"The Next Global Hot Spot to Worry About". [3]
Agence France-Presse's lede eschewed nuance and
accuracy to push the "PRC restricting freedom of
navigation" hot button:

China has granted its border patrol
police the right to board and turn away foreign
ships entering disputed waters in the South
China Sea... [4]

Then it was the turn
of the New York Times on December 1 to deliver an
anxiety upgrade: "Alarm as China Issues Rules for
Disputed Area". [5] Manila Times added a serving
of gasoline to the fire: "Chinese Police to Seize
Foreign Ships in Spratlys". [6] The Indian Express
evoked the Hainan regulations in its coverage:
"Ready to Protect Indian Interests in South China
Sea: Navy Chief". [7]

The reliably
unreliable Foreign Policy magazine website (which
recently elevated artist-provocateur-Twittermaster
Ai Weiwei to its list of 100 top world thinkers
while ignoring the determinedly thoughtful,
imprisoned, and Twitter-deprived Nobel laureate
Liu Xiaobo) outsourced its Hainan Coast Guard
coverage to an "It's the end of the world!"
commentary titled "Will China Go to War in 2013?"
from the conservative American Enterprise
Institute. It proposed the foreign policy
prescription:

Washington needs to make clear in
the strongest possible terms that freedom of
navigation won't be interfered with under any
circumstances, and that the US Navy will
forcibly prevent any ship from being boarded or
turned around by Chinese vessels. [8]

Thankfully, the Obama administration
did nothing of the sort. As reported by the New
York Times, it simply stated:

"All concerned parties should avoid
provocative unilateral actions that raise
tensions and undermine the prospects for a
diplomatic or other peaceful resolution."

This was probably in response to a
careful and informed reading of the news reports
concerning the new coastguard regulations, coupled
with the understanding that the Chinese
coastguard's area of responsibility is within the
PRC's 12-mile (19.3 kilometer) coastal waters
immediately contiguous to the various pesky
islands (the wide open spaces of the South China
Sea within the PRC's notorious nine-dash line fall
under the purview of the Maritime Surveillance
Force).

The target of the regulations is
not vessels exercising freedom of navigation to
transit China's claimed exclusive economic zone,
so the World War III hysterics of the American
Enterprise Institute were apparently misplaced.

M Taylor Fravel, a professor of political
science at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, contributed an analysis to The
Diplomat which concluded:

[T]he actions outlined above are all
concerned with Chinese territory or territorial
waters - not the much larger maritime areas that
press accounts have suggested. This is,
moreover, consistent with the duties of the
China's public security border defense units
that are the subject of the regulations. [9]

Saturday, December 08, 2012

[Update: It is possible that AP’s visit to Liu Xia was
facilitated by the regime.For a
possible precedent see Blind guy evades
100 captors and gets to Beijing just in time to give Hillary Clinton a headache.However, the timing doesn’t seem right to me,
as the reportage on Liu Xia detracted from the hoopla surrounding Mo Yan. If this were a CCP strategem, I would think the more effective strategy
would have been for Mo Yan and the PRC to claim their moment in the Nobel sun, then
a few days later allow the focus to shift to Liu Xiaobo’s incarceration and
what the new, ostensibly more hip and liberal regime of Xi Jinping might do
about it.Instead we get the framing of “posturing
of pro-regime hack undercut by image of Nobely/nobly suffering spouse”.If you want to tie yourself into
conspiratorial knots, you could speculate that hardliners secretly orchestrated
the visit to embarrass and anger the new leadership, thereby creating
conditions for Liu’s continued detention.]

Judging by tweets and retweets, Mo Yan is in the bad
books of Western journalists for failing to recognize that with the great
privilege of the Nobel Prize comes great responsibility, at least the responsibility
to demonstrate fealty to Western attitudes concerning intellectual freedom and
to demonstrate solidarity with other winners who are not in a position to enjoy
their prizes to the fullest…like Liu Xiaobo.

Mo’s statements supporting certain types of censorship as an
order-maintaining public good were unfavorably bookended with reports of a
journalistic coup: AP reporters somehow obtained access to Liu Xiaobo’s
wife,Liu Xia, who is held incommunicado
in Beijing.

Stunned that reporters were able to
visit her, Liu Xia trembled uncontrollably and cried as she described how
absurd and emotionally draining her confinement under house arrest has been in
the two years since her jailed activist husband, Liu Xiaobo, was named a Nobel
Peace laureate.In her first interview in 26 months,
Liu Xia spoke briefly with journalists from The Associated Press who managed to
visit her apartment Thursday while the guards who watch it apparently stepped away
for lunch. Her voice shook and she was breathless from disbelief at receiving
unexpected visitors.

…

Liu, dressed in a track suit and
slippers, was shaken to find several AP journalists at her door. Her first
reaction was to put her hands to her head and ask several times, "How did
you manage to come up? How did you manage?"

Around midday, the guards who keep a
24-hour watch on the main entrance of Liu's building had left their station — a
cot with blankets where they sit and sleep.

It is unlikely that the PRC regime decided to allow covert
access to Mdme. Liu at this particular instance, thereby letting the international
media rain on the parade of its preferred Nobelist, Mo Yan.The AP's journalistic derring-do is unlikely to
please Mdme. Liu’s jailers.

If the reporting concerning Mdme. Liu’s shock and surprise
is accurate, she is very likely terrified that the AP reporters’ visit will
lead to some retaliation against her: curtailment of the monthly visits to her
husband, or possible removal to even less endurable detention outside Beijing.

Maybe Mo Yan is not the only one who is learning that a
Nobel Prize brings with it unexpected and possibly unwanted responsibilities.

Maybe we’ll find out what kind of retaliation Liu Xia
suffers…the next time there’s another Chinese Nobel Prize…whenever that
happens.